From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Ever-Present Resistance and Cryptonormativity Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 13:52:57 +0100 > I appreciate the response, but it seems to miss my question. I certainly > agree that such a view/charges of cryptonormativity largely miss the point > and misconstrue Foucault. My question is the one that seems not to be > asked: > Why is it that resistance is ever-present? How do we know that wherever > there is power there is resistance? > To put it simply, because power is a micro- or constitutive relation which connects forces by discontinuity or disjunction, and the consequence of this relation of disjunction is that large scale formations of power do not mesh smoothly either internally or with one another. The picture is similar to Nietzsche's conception of the self, where he portrays a "noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another" (Genealogy, II.1). One of the consequences of this is that resistance for Foucault is hardly reducible to the resistance of individuals or groups (i.e., "delinquents" or "deviants") to power relations which constitute them as falling below some threshhold of normality, but is also to be found within the workings of disciplinary institutions and powers themselves. Two examples to be found in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: (1) the exercise of power to observe and investigate sexual deviance has the effect, by virtue of the voyeurism and erotic 'hide and seek' games it encourages, of proliferating rather than controlling sexual desire; (2) the various institutions such as the family and psychiatric bodies cooperate to monitor sexuality at home, but also come into conflict when psychiatrists seek to institutionalize family members. The fact that resistance includes non-subjective forms of this sort is presumably why Foucault never unambiguously advocates some sort of resistance politics, even though he was certainly very active in exposing and contesting various forms of power. Also, of course, such a resistence politics is also always under threat of reinstating the very sort of system it tries to oppose. These are, to be honest, points that Foucault doesn't work out very explicitly. Deleuze's book on Foucault may be worth a look. It has the advantage that it doesn't contain the sort of reductive readings that Deleuze and Guattari had earlier given of Foucaultian power relations. Nathan n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk
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